Topics

Agility and digital savvy traditionally haven't been the strong suits of government agencies, so it's encouraging that CIA Director John O. Brennan wants a big investment in cyberespionage and a new Directorate of Digital Innovation as part of what he calls a “bold” reorganization of the CIA. Brennan's overhaul is commendable, but it's urgent to do more to make his agency cyber literate. Cyber competence isn't just a set of technical skills; it's a state of mind. Digital thinking must be baked into the CIA's whole intelligence mission and its covert operations. No agency employee should be able to say “cyber” isn't in their...

Related "Central Intelligence Agency" Articles

Agility and digital savvy traditionally haven't been the strong suits of government agencies, so it's encouraging that CIA Director John O. Brennan wants a big investment in cyberespionage and a new Directorate of Digital Innovation as part of what he...

After more than a decade of hunting terrorists, stopping plots and scrambling from crisis to crisis, the CIA has concluded it has been outflanked and outwitted on a critical front: digital tradecraft.
On Friday, the CIA acknowledged that it was time to...

A federal jury Monday convicted former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for revealing to reporter James Risen highly classified details of a U.S. operation designed to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
Sterling, 47, of Missouri was convicted of six counts...

In an unprecedented news conference from CIA headquarters, agency Director John Brennan admitted that some officers had engaged in “abhorrent” conduct in their interrogations of terrorism suspects, but he insisted that the secret program had provided...

Former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was first to land a punch. Then former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in with a memoir that distanced herself from her president's foreign policy.
And Tuesday, former CIA chief and Defense...

As “Homeland” begins its fourth season on Showtime, about six months have passed since Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) sadly drew a star on the memorial wall at CIA headquarters.
That gesture honored her disgraced lover/comrade Nicholas Brody (Damian...

The Obama administration's muscular counter-terrorism campaign against a dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen is facing a new threat from the sudden military gains and growing political influence of a Shiite Muslim rebel group backed by Iran, according...

One of the chief points of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s torture of prisoners at its secret detention camps is that the expressed justifications for the often brutal interrogations shifted depending on circumstances. A prime example is the case of a...

The most extensive review of U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics in generations is set to be made public Tuesday and is expected to reignite a post-Sept. 11 public debate over the use of torture to combat terrorism.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's...

The CIA's brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects from 2002 to 2008 led to false confessions and fabricated information, produced no useful intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks and were so badly run that the CIA lost track of captives,...

Revelations about Central Intelligence Agency mistreatment of captive terrorism suspects spurred worldwide revulsion Tuesday and provided ammunition to foreign critics who accuse the United States of a double standard on human rights at home and...

To the editor: Since at least the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972, the world has fallen prey to new breeds of virulent, barbaric Islamist radicals who have done the following gruesome things: beheadings; suicide bombings; bombs in cars, buses, subways,...

When CIA interrogators waterboarded their first prisoner, Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, on Aug. 4, 2002, they justified the simulated drowning as a vital tool to extract secrets about future attacks against the United States.
But after 20 days of...

In mid-September, as the U.S. military prepared to launch cruise missiles against Islamic State militants in Syria for the first time, CIA analysts lobbied to expand the target list to include eight possible locations for leaders of a band of...

Militia commander Yuri Bereza and his 150 Ukrainian irregulars were closing in on pro-Moscow separatists in their last stronghold in this eastern city when Russian troops and armor thundered in out of nowhere to cut them off in the suburb of Ilovaisk.
No...

For his World War II service as an intelligence officer in Nazi-occupied France, Charles Hostler received a Legion of Merit award from the U.S. and a French Legion of Honor.
He also got something else: a scar on his forehead from the butt of a meat ax...

President Obama, who swept to power in 2008 in part on his promise to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, is clearly a reluctant warrior. His concern about getting involved in "mission creep" in the deserts of Iraq, where nearly 4,500 troops have...

A terrorist supposedly assassinated in an airstrike turns out to be alive – and likely plotting an attack on Americans – in Episode 404 (“Iron in the Fire”) of Showtime’s espionage thriller “Homeland.”
A secret informant identified Taliban leader Haissam...

Perhaps no other show on the air has experienced such whiplash-inducing extremes of praise and criticism as "Homeland," a program that's become a cautionary tale about the dangers of creating ambitious television in an era of relentless scrutiny...